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can you copy and paste images?
Can you copy and paste word documents containing images directly in to PBWiki? We have loads of documents and it will take forever if we have to save every image contained within them.
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The best answer from the company
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Helen and Jshavitz,
Yep - we wish it were otherwise, but there are some things the technology we've got available to us on the platforms we're running on (choose pretty much any combination of browsers, operating systems, source data format, source data origin) can't do at the level you'd expect of a traditional shrink-wrapped software package.
A lot of the technology behind point-and-click text editing on the web just doesn't provide us the expressiveness necessary to make the magical 'do what i mean' moment happen every time. As Joel pointed out, clipboards don't do the expected thing, and there are a lot of security- and format-related issues which prevent proper pasting of anything but the simplest of text when it's coming from some other application. These problems have been largely solved in the desktop software world for the last 20 years but the web is behind. We feel your pain and we want to make this stuff work too.
We're focused on providing simple utility to the most people possible, and sometimes it just isn't going to meet everyone's expectations. That doesn't mean we're not actively trying to push the boundaries of what's possible, but we'll only get there through iteration - taking advantage of the power of a hosted Software-as-a-Service platform to provide useful tools today and more-useful tools tomorrow, without you having to do anything but continue to use the service as it evolves.
At the same time as we're filling in those gaps and polishing our service, there are so many things around sharing, remote-working, and versioning which we do much more effectively than a traditional software approach, that we think PBwiki is really good enough for every-day, all-day use, and we do hope you stay tuned for all of the new goodness that's in store.
I’m excited
The company and 1 other person say
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?No, unfortunately not.
The sad truth is that modern web browsers simply do not provide a good way to allow people to cut and paste anything other than text into a web page. Paul Buchheit (the inventor of Gmail) covers this topic pretty thoroughly in a post on his blog: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007...
That said, I'm going to look into this more on Monday and see if there is a way we can help you get all of your documents into PBwiki. Expect to hear from me soon!
I’m sad to be the barer of bad news
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Inappropriate?Well, I've looked into this a bit more. We don't really have any tools that could help you yet. However, we are planning on implementing some tools to help people import Word documents into PBwiki later this year.
As an aside: I put up lots of documentation on a wiki at my last job. Since it was a lot of work to include screenshots of interfaces, I found that being very descriptive worked just as well (and in some cases, better) than including an image. So instead of a picture of where to click, I would add text along the lines of: "Click on the 'Preferences button, a window titled 'Preferences' will open. Change the the 'Value' property to '10' and then click 'OK'".
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Inappropriate?I sold computer software for many years, still do in fact.
I always felt like it was a sad reply when people asked for a feature we didn't have and I tried to tell them they really didn't need the feature.
I am just starting to use wiki for collaborative software documentation and I am stunned that there is no ability to easily copy and paste images directly into Wiki postings.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Helen and Jshavitz,
Yep - we wish it were otherwise, but there are some things the technology we've got available to us on the platforms we're running on (choose pretty much any combination of browsers, operating systems, source data format, source data origin) can't do at the level you'd expect of a traditional shrink-wrapped software package.
A lot of the technology behind point-and-click text editing on the web just doesn't provide us the expressiveness necessary to make the magical 'do what i mean' moment happen every time. As Joel pointed out, clipboards don't do the expected thing, and there are a lot of security- and format-related issues which prevent proper pasting of anything but the simplest of text when it's coming from some other application. These problems have been largely solved in the desktop software world for the last 20 years but the web is behind. We feel your pain and we want to make this stuff work too.
We're focused on providing simple utility to the most people possible, and sometimes it just isn't going to meet everyone's expectations. That doesn't mean we're not actively trying to push the boundaries of what's possible, but we'll only get there through iteration - taking advantage of the power of a hosted Software-as-a-Service platform to provide useful tools today and more-useful tools tomorrow, without you having to do anything but continue to use the service as it evolves.
At the same time as we're filling in those gaps and polishing our service, there are so many things around sharing, remote-working, and versioning which we do much more effectively than a traditional software approach, that we think PBwiki is really good enough for every-day, all-day use, and we do hope you stay tuned for all of the new goodness that's in store.
I’m excited
The company and 1 other person say
this answers the question
-
Inappropriate?but we used to be able to just copy and paste images! what happpened?
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